In line with the company's corporate vision of making quality technology accessible to everyone, disruptive Chinese electronics company Xiaomi recently unveiled a daring new product that offers a viable alternative to much more expensive ultra-thin laptops.

Aside from manufacturing and selling smartphones, air purifiers, smart bands, and powerbanks, the people behind Xiaomi have decided to also get their hands into crafting ultrabooks!

Xiaomi MiBook Air is the company's first ever effort in this product category dominated by legendary tech giants like Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, Acer, and Toshiba, among others.

Flaunting a full metal body, just like Apple Macbook Air and Macbook Pro with Retina Display, MiBook Air is available in two models; One with 12.5-inch display priced at around $530 USD or Php 25,000, and another with 13.3-inch screen priced at $750 or roughly Php 35,000.

13.3-inch Mi Notebook Air sports a Full HD resolution screen framed by a 5.59mm-thick bezel. And with weight of 1.28kg and dimensions of 309.6 x 210.9 x 148.8mm, this notebook is 11-percent smaller and 2.2mm thinner than the current MacBook Air with the same screen size.

This larger and more expensive model runs Windows 10 Home OS with a 6th generation Intel Core i5 processor that's complemented with Nvidia GeForce 940MX GPU with 1GB of GDDR5 VRAM, 8GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 256GB PCIe SSD in one of the two SSD drive slots (the other being vacant). The battery can be charged to 50% in just 30 minutes and the company claims that this MiBook version delivers 9.5 hours of uptime coming from 100%.

On the other hand, 12.5-inch MiBook Air is just 12.9mm thin and weighs only 1.07kg. Its screen is also Full HD, making it more pixel dense compared to that of the 13.3 model. Under the hood, this notebook is powered by an Intel Core M3 processor and comes with 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB SATA SSD (plus a vacant secondary SSD slot). The uptime is longer at 11.5 hours on a full charge.

As for Xiaomi services, the two models support unlocking via Mi Band 2 and come with Mi Cloud Sync that let the user quickly sync his or her phone contacts, messages, photo gallery, and other content.

Out in Gold and Silver, Xiaomi MiBook Air 13.3-inch and 12.5-inch are now up for purchase in China, Xiaomi's home country. No word yet regarding their availability in other key markets as well as here in the Philippines, where the company has recently mellowed down its operations. Here's to hoping, though, that our online sellers would be keen on bringing these notebooks here as soon as they can. I'd love to give the 13.3-inch model a test run!